Future Now
The IFTF Blog
History of pervasive games #2: Pac-Manhattan
Let me state my hope that Pac-Man will perpetually be one of the first games to be brought into any new gaming medium, whether it's pervasive or holographic or even implanted into our brains. Pac-Manhattan was a cute experiment done by students of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2004, and was one of the most direct examples of the pervasive gaming concept of 'city as gameboard'...
Gameplay was simple, and you'll know the story if you played the original: one player was designated as Pac-Man (complete with costume) and had to run around Manhattan finding dots to eat, all the while trying to evade 4 ghosts (also players with costumes). Pac-Man and the ghosts were in contact by cell phone with a 'mission control' center staffed by humans who tracked players' positions on a master map. The game ended when the Pac-Man-man ate all of the dots (eating a dot consisted of touching a signpost at each intersection) or was tagged by a ghost.
The Pac-Man player got a costume to make the game truly pervasive
Truth be told, Pac-Manhattan was a bit of a Wizard-of-Oz-type operation, with the people in the mission control center acting as the 'man behind the curtain', or, in the case of pervasive gaming, acting as GPS, WiFi, or other technologies that would allow a game like this to be run without humans behind the scenes. But that's ok, since the experience of gameplay was innovative and closely approximated how a game like this would have played out even if technology handled everything. Pac-Manhattan was most successful demonstrating that the city can make a compelling gameboard for future types of pervasive, off-the-screen games. It turns out that the Lower East Side makes for as intricate and challenging of gameplay as a desert planet or secret castle. In future posts I'll look at other pervasive gaming experiments that have used the urban landscape as a major component of the game, creating an invisible layer of fiction on top of the real world that only those in-the-know can access.